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BlogMarch 2013

We are pleased to announce that a recently published scientific communication involving researchers at the Pfizer Institute of Pharmaceutical Materials Science and CCDC has appeared as a CrystEngComm hot-article. The article summarises exciting results assessing the potential of the Mercury Solid Form Suite’s hydrogen bond propensity tool in screening potential co-crystal formers, and is available to view free of charge for 4 weeks from 20th March.

The published study describes the co-crystal screening of the anti-malarial drug pyrimethamine with various pharmaceutically acceptable adducts. Co-crystals offer completely new physical properties compared to a pure active ingredient and are viewed as a rich source of novel solid forms in the pursuit of a stable candidate for drug or agrochemical product development. Co-crystallising pairs of actives with different or complementary pharmacological effects is also an elegant potential route to multi-drug therapy. Developing methods to better suggest successful co-crystallisation experiments is, therefore, of great interest.

We at CCDC are keen advocates of the use of 3D structure to aid with the teaching of key chemical concepts. Following a demo of WebCSD and existing teaching material intended for undergraduate teaching, Dr Peter Hoare at the University of Newcastle has been developing (with the help of A level and masters students) bite-size worksheets intended for A Level standard chemistry, making use of our free teaching subset and WebCSD. Here, Peter's current MChem student Steve Carman explains a bit more about the exercises they have developed and how you can get your hands on them!

​On Monday afternoon, our new SharePoint-powered website completed its public beta test phase and was officially released. After months of testing, incorporating user feedback and implementing enhancements, we are very pleased to be able to announce formally this first version of the site. It is now accessible via our standard www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk web address.

The technical changes needed to facilitate this release went very smoothly, and resulted in virtually no interruption of service. We took this opportunity to roll out new load balancing capabilities, which are now responsible for managing all incoming traffic to our website and most of our public web services. This offers significant benefits through the centralised management of our web services and redirects, and should offer maximum flexibility to respond to changing requirements in future, without disrupting access to existing systems. You shouldn’t notice the difference – but we will all be able to deploy new features with a high degree of confidence that acceptable service levels will be maintained.